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Tuesday, 29 December 2015

If you have ever lost a blog post in the draft stage Open Live Writer may solve that problem for you. A quick look at my Blogger account revealed I had 3 posts in Draft. The problem with the Draft format in Blogger is that it is easy to make a mistake when editing, deleting or moving text around. If an accidental highlight leads to a deletion or an unwanted alteration is made, one must be very quick to Undo before Blogger’s automatic Save cuts in and all that text disappears.
I use Blogsy, an excellent app for posting from the ipad but my preference is to use the laptop whenever possible. Sometimes I have written posts in Evernote then copied into Blogger. This method means that all formatting needs to be done in Blogger. The beauty of Open Live Writer is all the formatting can be done and previewed before posting.

Why would you use Open Live Writer?

draft posts can be viewed within the application

draft posts are saved to one’s own computer

finished posts can be sent straight to your blog

the interface is similar to most word processing programs

no unnecessary behind the scenes code that slows down the display of your posts

the menu bar has more sophisticated tools than that in Blogger

image/picture manipulation has its own toolbar with crop, format, exact dimensions and more

unlike word processors, OLW is designed for blog posting, once set up the process is easy

it is free and open source

Getting started

It is then necessary to log in to your blog account. I was already logged into my Google account and received an error message in the browser but when I returned to the OLW installation screen the next step had appeared.

By downloading the theme your blog uses it ensures that you view the post as it will appear online.

Now you are ready to write and post. Remember to Save regularly as there do not appear to be preferences that can be set to automatic save. Your local saved drafts can be found under File > Open Local Drafts.
To add another service or another blog choose menu option Blog Account > Blog options >Add

Images in this post were dragged on to the editing window. The width of each picture is set to 390px to give a uniform look to the post. This enables much better image control than the small, medium, large options provided in the Blogger interface. When editing and previewing are finished, one can choose to Publish direct or Post to Drafts. Warning: the spell check tool in OLW is not yet working! This post was written, previewed in OLW then posted directly from OLW to Library Currants.

Tuesday, 15 December 2015

Here's another method to make those old family photos available to your siblings and cousins.

Sign up for Flickr to get 1 terabyte of free storage for your photos. Photos can be made public, viewable by anyone, or private so they are only seen by you or those to whom you send a guest pass. Usage permissions are set using Creative Commons licencing. Upload can be automatic from mobile devices and computers or one can use the simple drag and drop interface if family photos are already organised into folders.

Once photos are added on the Choose Photos/Drag and drop screen, one can:

edit titles

add descriptions and tags

set viewing permissions

add to an album or create an album.

Edit information on this screen before upload

Once this initial information is added to your satisfaction, photos are then uploaded and will appear in your photostream and in the album you created. Albums can contain both public and private pictures. I recommend making your uploads private until you are ready to share them. I do not advise adding to a group from this screen.

To add further details to the photos, choose Albums then Edit in Organizr.
Choose an individual photo to add the date the original photo was taken. Exact dates, single years or approximate years can be added through the date tab shown on the Organizr screenshot below.

Adding your pictures to the Trove group

All images included in this group are also made searchable in Trove, a service hosted by the National Library of Australia but built on the collections of thousands of organisations and individuals!

Trove provides the instructions for adding your pictures. All pictures added to the group must be made public. It is worth noting the need for accurate tags and descriptions as these are used in the Trove search. To make the best use of this service, revisit titles, descriptions and tags before adding them to the group as any subsequent edits in Flickr after Trove has harvested your photos and data will only be visible in Flickr not Trove.

Here are some early photos I have added, seen here on a search result screen in Trove.

Photos searchable through Trove

I've added these records to my family lists in Trove. Here's the O'Dea list with the photos now visible.
Thanks to Flickr and Trove, my cousins now have another avenue to find their relatives.